Scientists discover ancient enzymes evolve new tricks

Plants, herbivores, and pathogens are locked in a war for survival that is hundreds of millions of years old. Rooted in place and with no way to run, plants evolved complex, chemical-producing machinery in their cells to ...

Shipment tracking for 'fat parcels' in the body

Without fat, nothing works in the body: Fats serve as energy suppliers and important building blocks, including for the envelopes of living cells. Numerous diseases are related to disorders in fat metabolism such as obesity ...

Making infant formula more like human breast milk

U.K.-based scientists have engineered plants to produce an oil that mimics the chemical structure of human milk fat, a major component of breast milk. Previous studies suggest the human form of this molecule, triacylglycerol, ...

Spore formation model could advance medicine

Michigan State University scientists have produced experimental and modeling results that shed light on how a particular type of enzyme functions during spore formation, potentially advancing human health and disease research.

Novel histone modifications couple metabolism to gene activity

Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) have discovered that two new classes of histone modifications couple cellular metabolism to gene activity. The study was published ...

Chemistry in mold reveals important clue for pharmaceuticals

In a discovery that holds promise for future drug development, scientists have detected for the first time how nature performs an impressive trick to produce key chemicals similar to those in drugs that fight malaria, bacterial ...

Scientists hijack light-loving bacteria to produce fatty acid

Scientists have directed a common bacterium to produce more of a valuable fatty acid, lauric acid, than it typically does. The achievement is noteworthy not simply because of the increased production of fatty acid, which ...

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